It has been around 40 years since the so-called Disneyland Strike, a walkout of Walt Disney workers for 22 days. After 35 years of the event, Alt-Disney remembered it with a series of writings.
As thousands of Walt Disney employees walked out of their jobs on September 25, 1984, the amusement park made itself accessible. It was the largest-ever strike in Disneyland. Ride operators, custodians, ticket sellers, sales clerks and warehouse staffers joined outside Disneyland as they protested the company’s wage-freeze proposal and reductions in health benefits. Disneyland made clerical staffers equipped enough to operate its rides as well as contemplated flying in staffers from its Tokyo and Orlando counterparts. That was how Disneyland prepared for the great strike.
However, in the case of Alice In Wonderland, the company enlisted industrial designer Bob Kurzweil who designed that pubic attraction. Kurzweil worked in the capacity of an amusement park ride operator from 1959 onwards. He repeated the same role at the start of the great strike in Disneyland. A coalition of five unions that organized it cautioned Disneyland visitors that scabs could not confirm that they were safe when on rides if they went across the picket lines.
A worker on strike held a signboard that asked what the scab did as he spent 32 hours driving a monorail. The Disneyland Mouse House got the right media person in Kurzweil for undermining the attack from the union. The LA Times published a news article about Kurzweil headlined, “Good Help Hired.” The designer told an LA Times reporter that there was some unhappiness in him regarding going across the Disneyland picket line. The designer abandoned a brief commute between Van Nuys and the office of Walt Disney Imagineering in Glendale for a trip to Anaheim city.
The park visitors who crossed the line considered Kurzweil a nice person, and the sentiment proved mutual. The designer told the LA Times that it was nice to be outdoors and meet the users of the amusement rides. However, the designer felt anxious about getting back to amusement ride designing work after a few days on that job. The strike went on for 20 more days.
